Mothers

by Chris Power

  We edged into the cold water and stood beside each other. Mum had coated me in sun cream, and I stood watching the water around my knees go oily. ‘St Paul was shipwrecked here,’ she said, standing with her hands on her hips. ‘That’s why it’s called St Paul’s Bay. You know who St Paul is, don’t you?’

  ‘They read his letters out at Mass.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  We waded further into the water, which began to feel warmer. It was clear, with a light green tinge. The pale sand shifted under our feet. Tiny ribbons of seaweed hung in the water.

  ‘Paul persecuted the followers of Jesus when he was a young man,’ Mum said, ‘but when he was travelling to Damascus, Jesus appeared to him.’

  If I had read about this in a fantasy novel I would have been rapt, but everything with the taint of church had all the wonder drained out of it. It was the longest hour of each week. As Mum spoke my attention drifted, and I looked towards a small white chapel at the edge of the bay. An old man was locking the door with a padlock. He walked to the edge of the water, his hands in his pockets, and spat a long brown stream onto the rocks below.

  ‘… and that’s why,’ Mum said as we leaned forward into the water and began to breaststroke, our fingertips just touching, ‘he began travelling around … the Mediterranean … preaching,’ squeezing her words between breaths as we swam faster. I soon wanted to turn around. I wasn’t used to swimming in the sea, and although the water was quite shallow I didn’t like – still don’t like – the thought of space below me in which something might be moving. My imagination fills the void.

  ‘And he actually came here?’ I asked, to distract myself from this predicament as much as anything. I stopped swimming and began to tread water.

  ‘That’s right,’ Mum said, stopping a little further ahead, ‘he sailed into a storm and he was shipwrecked, right here in this bay.’

  I saw bearded men dragging each other from the foaming water, their soaked robes sleek as otter pelts. Rain fell from a dark sky. Fragments of wood and shreds of sail churned in the water. I felt a tentacle snake around my feet and thrashed my legs to get away, but it was only a current of colder water. Towards the shore I saw a golden rock rising from the sea and I longed to be sitting on it. To be touched only by air. I swam towards it, my breathing shallow with growing panic. When I reached the rock I scrambled onto it. The water running off me turned the gold stone grey.

  *

  Because Anna and I don’t drive we’re reliant on taxis and buses, which on Cephalonia isn’t ideal. Luckily, for some unfathomable reason, our eldest daughter loves waiting for the bus. She thinks it’s sophisticated. She stands apart from us and looks around in a way she considers extremely grown-up: mouth puckered with dissatisfaction, nose imperiously raised. ‘I’m waiting for the bus,’ she says haughtily to whomever happens to be closest to her. Since she was born I’ve tried to maintain a record of this kind of thing – attitudes, mispronunciations, nonsense stories she tells – and when I go back to it I’m amazed by how much I’ve already forgotten.

  *

  I remember a morning spent wandering around Mandráki Harbour. Standing on the harbour wall, Dad pointed out some brown smudges above the blue horizon. ‘Turkey,’ he said.

  The harbour was where the Colossus of Rhodes had once stood: one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The guidebook said it couldn’t have really stood astride the harbour the way so many paintings show; its weight would have been too great. But everywhere we went I saw postcards of it with one foot on each wall, and anyone walking out to the mouth of the harbour couldn’t help but stare across from one stone pier to the other and think, ‘This is where it was.’ I stood there and saw it rising a hundred feet above me, the same emerald green as the Jolly Green Giant, naked except for a loincloth. It faced the sea, a bow and quiver on its back and one arm raised and holding a burning torch. I imagined myself aboard a merchant ship sailing between the Colossus’s legs. We sailors craned our heads as the sun disappeared and we entered into the lake of shadow beneath the vast statue. The noise of the busy harbour, the slap of waves against the boat’s hull and the cries of birds overlapped and echoed. A chill haze of salt spray hung in the air.

  I imagined the sloping foot of the Colossus beside me on the harbour wall, its toenails big as turtle shells. It collapsed in an earthquake, the story goes, and lay rusting for hundreds of years, and when it was sold for scrap it took a thousand camels to take it all away.

  *

  I remember a couple of other things. Not other things: the main thing. I was in a cafe playing an arcade game. My brothers, I think, had gone back to the hotel. Mum and Dad, I think, were in a neighbouring shop buying crockery. They bought me a Coke and gave me a stack of coins for the game. I’m not sure that’s how it was, and it seems strange that I would have been left alone, but I had to have been alone, or at least distant enough from everyone that I felt alone, and the game I was playing was definitely Asteroids, which I do remember because it was a game I never liked; I always struggled to correct for the inertia that dragged my ship where I didn’t want to go.

  I was sitting on a barstool, my Coke on a table behind me. The arcade game was beside the window, through which I saw a car park and beyond it the smooth water of the harbour. The bright sun made it difficult to see the screen. The heat made my thighs stick to the leather seat, and a crack in the cushion pinched my skin as I squirmed in unison with the chaotic movements of my ship.

  A man came and stood close beside me. Right away it felt strange, the closeness. He said something I didn’t understand and I turned to look up at him. He had a kind face, pudgy and tanned. His hair was black and lay in curls at his collar. He smiled down at me, and I smiled back. My palms prickled. I crashed into another asteroid. I looked down at the man’s loose trousers, his sandals, his feet. There were spots of white paint on his toes. He spoke again and put his hand on my leg, just above the knee. I looked at the screen and saw my ship spinning, spinning. I looked around and saw the owner of the place standing behind the counter reading a newspaper. A woman sat at a table, staring at her plate as she chewed her food. Voices gabbled from a radio. The man lifted his hand and placed it halfway up my thigh. He murmured something that sounded like encouragement and gestured at the screen with his free hand while the other kneaded my thigh. He had a friendly smile. I continued to smile, not knowing what else to do. When I looked back at the screen several asteroids were closing in. My hands were frozen. My ship shattered into three lines that floated apart and slowly faded into the black. The man’s hand, heavy on my thigh, moved slightly, and he exhaled through his nose. I felt that warm expelled air run across my cheek and down my neck. I felt his fingers flex, and one of them came to rest against the tip of my penis. GAME OVER, the screen said. I spun the ball as his finger began to roll backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards across it.

  I pressed my hands against the game cabinet, kicked back my stool and ran to the door. It was locked, and as I pushed helplessly against it I could hear the other people in the cafe moving quickly towards me. The air grew thicker, hotter. I yanked and the door opened: I had pushed when I needed to pull. I turned and saw the man still standing beside the arcade machine; the woman still staring at her plate; at the counter the owner looked up from his paper and towards me at the door with weary curiosity. ‘Goodbye!’ I shouted at all of them, and ran outside.

  That night my family went for a walk after dinner, but I didn’t want to go. I asked to go back to the room instead. I said I was tired. Mum went up to the room with me, and told me to lock the door and not open it to anyone. ‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ she said. After she had gone I got my game from the cupboard, opened the box and took out the pieces.

  *

  Nora has sunburn. It’s my fault. We fell asleep together on a sun lounger and the sun swung around and now her foot has a stripe, red as a ribbon, running across the heel. She cried and cried, and couldn’t sleep at all the night aft
er it happened. For a while, silently and ridiculously, I blamed my wife for wanting this holiday in the sun. Now we make a thing of moisturising the burn. ‘Foot drinking,’ my daughter says, watching carefully as I rub in, as gently as possible, the chill white liquid. ‘It’s so cold!’ Nora says, looking at me, her eyes widened in a rehearsed and pleasurable surprise. She wears her socks on the beach, only taking them off when she goes into the sea. When we are back in London her skin will peel, revealing the next layer, and before long she – we – won’t even remember the pain she suffered.

  *

  Ippotón Street, the Street of the Knights, ran down towards the harbour between buildings of biscuit-coloured stone. In the late afternoon a diagonal stripe of shadow divided the street. I pretended the sun was lethal: stepping outside the shadow meant death. The street was busy with tourists leaving the Old Town and heading to the harbour for sunset.

  Absorbed in my game, I didn’t realise how far I had dropped behind my family. Halfway down the street, almost hidden in the shadow of an alcove, I saw a cat curled into a circle. As I approached it lifted its head, its eyes open to slits, and let out a quavering miaow. It was very thin, and its black-and-white fur was matted with dirt. Crouching down beside it I saw a deep wound on its neck. It had a thick, pale yellow goo around its eyes. It was obviously dying. Tentatively I reached out to stroke its back. Its fur was sticky with dirt. Very slowly, as if immensely tired, it moved its head back over its shoulder, feebly seeking my hand. I stood and looked around. Crowds of people were passing, but no one was paying any attention to me. I scuffed my leg backwards and forwards a couple of times. The sole of my trainer whispered against the smooth stone of the pavement. I swung my leg again, harder, and felt the faintest resistance as my foot brushed against the cat’s head; it made another small pleading sound. I can help, I thought. I swung my leg again, then rested my palms against the wall and shut my eyes and kicked as hard as I could. I heard a crunch, like a Coke can being flattened. I opened my eyes to look, then turned to face the street. The crowds walked on, oblivious.

  *

  On the last day before going home we went back to St Paul’s Bay. It was overcast, the tide was out, and in the grey light the golden rock looked more like a lump of cement dumped in the dull water. I kicked pinecones across the sand and thought about what I’d do for the rest of the summer.

  Dad walked out from behind a bush in his trunks. ‘Sure you don’t want to swim?’ he said.

  I shook my head. I sat down on the sand and listened to cries of pain carrying over the water. At the mouth of the bay, missiles flitted back and forth. The Greeks had the higher ground and the barbarians were being slaughtered. The sea, stained red, was nearly solid with the corpses of men and animals. In the sky a spacecraft spun wildly. Beside the church at the side of the bay the old caretaker was scrubbing a stained patch of wall.

  The battle went on and on. My family ignored it. They swam in the bloody water as the Greeks’ missiles climbed slowly into the sky and sped downwards. The barbarians threw up their arms and bellowed to meet them, brave and full of hate.

  *

  My family went on holiday to Rhodes in 1985, more than thirty years ago. There were many times when I thought about telling my parents what happened, but I never did. The more time that passed, the less certain I became that I should tell them. And now I’ve written this it already seems more real than whatever ‘actually’ happened, even though there’s so much I left out. Like Kostas, our waiter at Top 13, the restaurant we went to, as I remember it, every single night of the holiday. My middle brother, a gifted caricaturist, drew a picture of Kostas and gave it to him as a present. In the picture he was lifting his arms heroically, carrying three huge trays loaded with food while bikini-clad women clung to his legs. He gave us his pen, a cheap plastic biro with the name of the restaurant printed on it in golden block capitals. It was a prized possession at first, one my brothers and I fought over, but sooner or later it lost its allure and became just another pen in a pot.

  We met an American woman called Nancy on an excursion to a ruined temple or a ruined fort; I forget which. She was a teacher, and was living in London for a year on an exchange programme. We stayed in touch, and five years later the whole family travelled to Corvallis, Oregon to visit her. A few years after that, when I was travelling around the US, her daughter Karla put me up in New York.

  But there isn’t any room for them here. Stories need everything extraneous to be stripped away, and Nancy and Kostas, let alone Karla, are extraneous. So are my brothers, who are barely present at all. I probably should have left them out altogether, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Plus, my being an only child would have raised other questions, like ‘Why did his parents leave him alone in the cafe?’

  Which is a good question anyway. I can’t remember where they were when I encountered that man. I find it hard to believe they weren’t there – around a corner maybe; I remember the arcade game being in a sequestered space, the kind of side room where you might find a pool table tucked away, or air hockey. When I tried writing it like that, though, with them so close by, it seemed implausible. Other than that, what I describe is faithful to my memory of the event. It would have been more dramatic if the guy had started masturbating himself like the tramp in the Joyce story, but he didn’t.

  What I didn’t do is kill a cat. But I did see a cat get killed. It really was on Ippotón Street, and I might well have been playing that game with the sun, I used to do stuff like that all the time. I saw this kitten curled against the wall (it’s a cat in the story because a kitten would be too much). It was dirty and sick, and as I was stroking it a group of Greek kids surrounded me. The leader, a boy maybe a year or two older than me, started shouting. I didn’t understand what he was saying, but he was obviously angry. He pushed me down on the ground and kicked the kitten two or three times until it was dead. Cats are pests there.

  And I shut my penis in my zip. Another thing I never told my family. We were going to dinner, Dad and my brothers were already downstairs in the lobby, and Mum was waiting for me just outside the toilet door. She wasn’t hurrying me, but I felt like I was keeping everyone waiting. I shook off and quickly yanked up the zip of my trousers. Too quickly. I won’t try and describe the pain. It’s enough to say I looked down and saw these angry pink bubbles of flesh squeezed between the zip’s teeth. I tried writing about stifling my tears, about wadding toilet paper into my pants, about the scar I was left with, but I scrapped it. Boy gets felt up, sees kitten being kicked to death, then rips penis up in zip? What’s anyone meant to do with a story like that?

  The funny thing is, the scar on my penis (a line of raised, caramel-coloured skin as thin as a credit card) is the only tangible evidence I have of anything that happened in Rhodes. The sunglasses broke and were thrown away, I lost the sweatband, and Crossbows and Catapults was exiled to a cupboard shelf before being donated to a jumble sale along with boxes of other once-prized possessions.

  Maybe it’s because I never spoke about these things to anyone that I find it so difficult to shape them into a story now. And if I can’t do that, what are the chances anyone else will? When, if, my parents and brothers hear about the man, or the cat, or my penis, it will only confuse them. ‘Are you sure it really happened that way?’ they’ll say. ‘Can it have been like that?’ It’s understandable. It was thirty years ago, and even if what I’ve described were objectively true, what does it mean if no one else knows about it? And what will change if people do know? What difference does writing about it make? Maybe it’s easier to say I made it all up.

  But when I look at my daughters squatting on the sand, burying their toys and making little streets and houses with shells, I can’t help but wonder: if the same thing happened to them, would I want to know? And if I knew, what then? Would I find the man who did it? Report him? Beat him? Kill him?

  I’ve rarely spoken to anyone about what happened on Rhodes, but not so long ago, when I started thinkin
g about this story, I described it to a lawyer I met at a party and she laughed and said, ‘And that happened to you once? That happens to girls hundreds of times. After a while it’s not even news.’

  Can that really be true? I tell myself it can’t, of course it can’t. Saying something doesn’t make it true, nor does silence strip the truth of its authority. I know what happened to me, and that I won’t let it happen to these girls I can still enfold in my arms, and who jiggle their feet on my thighs. It’s impossible to say they will always be safe, but sometimes it can feel like the truth, the same way that when you stand at the mouth of Mandráki Harbour you can see the Colossus soaring above you. I tell the girls about the statue that was the biggest the earth had seen, that took twelve years to build, and that one day fell and a thousand camels came to take it all away. ‘Is it true, Dad?’ Sonja asks. ‘Did it really happen like that?’ And I say of course it’s true, every word.

  INNSBRUCK

  Many swear that the loveliest village on the Costa Brava is Cadaqués – a cluster of brilliant white buildings surrounded by olive groves, hugging a turquoise bay dotted with colourful fishing boats. Both it and the surrounding area blend wind, water, light and rock to enchanting effect.

  Eva is in Spain, where she will decide one way or the other. She is standing on a dry-stone wall, brambles at her back and a cliff edge before her. Ten metres below, the water seethes over rocks. There is no beach here but this peninsula has scores of them, small and stony and empty. She has seen the words ‘playa nudista’ spray-painted somewhere on the rocks at every one she has been to. A local joke, she thinks. She took her bikini off once, but when she did it felt like everything was watching her: the trees, the birds, the advancing sea.